


Great Temperance and Open Air

by ken_ichijouji (dommific)



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art Deco Period, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Back On My Tanabata Bullshit, Decopunk, For Best Results Play the Elton John "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" on Repeat, Frottage, Long-Haired Katsuki Yuuri, Long-Haired Victor Nikiforov, M/M, Seriously When Have I Steered You Wrong?, Swan Maiden Victor Nikiforov, The Character Death is Temporary I Assure You, Underwater Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 16:03:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18318626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dommific/pseuds/ken_ichijouji
Summary: The bather had not noticed his presence at all. There was no one else around for miles, too busy were the other citizens with shopping and gossip surrounded by gas lamps within dancehalls featuring the new electric jazz music everyone adored.It was the bather’s, of this Yuuri was certain.Yuuri could steal the cloak with the man none the wiser, for he had great stamina as well as being fleet of foot. It would save his family’s dreams as well as bestow upon them security. All of their sacrifices would be at an end: his sister never married to aid in the inn’s upkeep, his father’s wrinkled brow and more strained smiles, his mother’s hands now red and permanently blistered thanks to their endless hours of toiling.He left the cloak where it lay. Security gained through theft is not secure at all; even in his youth, he knew this to be true.Not everything that glitters is gold, or even truly worthwhile. Yuuri, a humble inn-keeper's son in a world of polished glass and greed, surprises a lovely stranger by showing him what true kindness means.





	Great Temperance and Open Air

A city made of polished brass, mirrors, and seaglass shone by the ocean. It was mostly quiet there, as people came and went to tend to business affairs. The downtown would bustle thanks to the crackle of newly-invented neon lights that advertised film starlets and serial televised dramas about queens and highwaymen. The engines of hydrogen-powered Rolls Royces and Mitsuoka limousines took their passengers to any possible destination as long as there were roads. 

In a more modest inn — truly a relic of a time long gone, as it was built of brick and bamboo — a boy was born in early winter with hair like polished obsidian and eyes a mahogany so deep they enveloped a viewer in their warmth nearly instantly. The name bestowed upon him was meant to grant courage and triumph, but his heart shattered more easily than an ocean pearl under a similar weight of pressure. Upon coming of age to lift, scrub, and mop, the boy called Yuuri was put to work to help his family earn their livelihood. 

Yuuri would attend school and help with the inn, and far too late in the night he would walk along the shore. Not too close as he couldn’t swim, but the sound of the sea soothed his nerves, and he would sometimes sit far back enough to watch the waves at high tide. He would gather broken oysters for their pearls (scarce, but exciting when found) and pieces of bright red coral to sell in the inn’s shop. 

On one such night when Yuuri was not quite yet fourteen, he saw a figure in white, with hair cascading down their back like liquid moonbeams. They glided over the clear water itself with bare feet in  vestments woven of spun gossamer and pure alabaster feathers. Their throat was bedecked in chalcedony and silver, and Yuuri dared not speak lest this vision disappear.

They met his eyes then, an electric blue that almost glowed locking into his deep brown, and he realized they were a young man, perhaps slightly older than Yuuri himself. A vortex of the North Wind and white feathers spirited him away, and Yuuri’s face was equal parts longing and sad.

For years, Yuuri would sit close to the same spot in the sea and wait for a sign. Moonlight, dusk, the golden hour, crimson dawns — he came at every conceivable day and time to get a glimpse of the mysterious man again.

The mystery faded in favor of practicalities as they often do, and Yuuri helped more at the inn. He would begin his days fishing for the patrons’ meals, and run errands with his older sister as the hair belonging to their mother and father became more gray than dark. The inn grew steadily less busy; the newer, glittering spas downtown with polished gates and agate mosaics outshone their simpler offerings of polished wood and bamboo.

Yuuri never let on to his mother that he heard her and his father try to find a way to cut expenses and keep their livelihood afloat. He gave up on the possibility of school then, of learning to dance and seeing the world, for he loved his family and could not bear to see them flounder.

Fishing helped ease his family’s burden. He sold baubles he’d find at the shore for money or barter for the inn’s supplies. Hs sister tried making jewelry of the shells and coral. They fetched a decent price; the wealthier men in town purchased them as tokens for their lovers. If Yuuri found something that could outdo a previous offering, he would auction it to the highest bidder as they were never satisfied with all they had — it needed to be  _ bigger, more, greater, shinier _ . While Yuuri couldn’t quite understand their impulses, the money helped keep the mortgage paid every month, though it could not help with emergencies, and Yuuri knew his parents were foregoing their own salaries more than they would admit.

One free afternoon, Yuuri spotted a man bathing in the ocean. On a sandbank not far from the bather lay a magnificent cloak of pure white silk, trimmed and edged with diamonds, quartz, and pure, long, soft feathers. It was as if sea mist had become a royal vestment embellished with the very stars themselves.

Those men who cared more about showing off with empty luxuries than expressing actual love would pay handsomely for such a magnificent garment. It would keep the inn afloat beyond Yuuri’s grandchildren’s deaths for what he could suggest as an asking price.

The bather had not noticed his presence at all. There was no one else around for miles, too busy were the other citizens with shopping and gossip surrounded by gas lamps within dancehalls featuring the new electric jazz music everyone adored.

It was the bather’s, of this Yuuri was certain.

Yuuri could steal the cloak with the man none the wiser, for he had great stamina as well as being fleet of foot. It would save his family’s dreams as well as bestow upon them security. All of their sacrifices would be at an end: his sister never married to aid in the inn’s upkeep, his father’s wrinkled brow and more strained smiles, his mother’s hands now red and permanently blistered thanks to their endless hours of toiling.

He left the cloak where it lay. Security gained through theft is not secure at all; even in his youth, he knew this to be true.

He came back the next evening and managed to catch some abalones, which would drum up dining patrons as well as add something special for the jewelry buyers. Yuuri smiled as he wiped moisture off the outside of an abalone, only half noticing a noise like the beating of wings through the air.

When Yuuri looked up, there stood the man from so long ago, of shadow and silver with eyes to match the banner of Aquarius. He reminded Yuuri of a painting in the Sky Museum from a trip when he was younger, of a timeless beauty with an expression that could be interpreted ten different ways. When he spoke, he simply said, “You didn’t take it.”

It would not become either of them for Yuuri to play the fool. “I… no,” he finished.

“Why? Your kind always does.”

“The robe is yours. Truthfully, my family could use the money it would bring,” Yuuri replied. “Our inn is struggling and if it closes, we will have nothing, but it would not be right for me to take that which is not mine.”

“You must want something then.  _ I have watched you watch me for years _ . Your kind always makes demands of us as well as each other. I lost Lilia to one of you: a sour man with no hair and a red face. He stole her skin and hid it, imprisoning her as his unwilling bride.”

Yuuri did not remember seeing any men when he would wait for him to appear — a flock of swans, but never other humans. “I was satisfied knowing you’re real, and perhaps if you choose, I’d be honored to know you as you are.”

The man did not alter his expression, yet he softened somehow all the same. He gripped the cloak less tightly, an almost imperceptible lowering of a shield.

Yuuri shrugged. “It is not right to take something that could be given freely.”

His eyes gleamed like a full moon unobstructed by clouds. “I see.”

Yuuri nodded and offered a sad but crooked smile. He could have been a friend, but it was not to be. He saw it clearly in that moment, and the shame and pain rendered him almost mute. “I must return to the inn.” As Yuuri grabbed the abalones, he gave him another look. “It was nice to see you again.”

He walked back to his home, and passed by his father discussing how the ledgers were red yet again. He presented Mari with the abalones. She promptly shucked them, giving the meat to their mother to cook for the dining hall. Mari then polished the shells; their insides resembled mother-of-pearl in shades of peach, lilac, and white.

Yuuri awakened before dawn the next morning and walked to shore with his fishing pole with a heavy heart. The abalone special bought them some time on an overdue bill, but that creditor’s good will would run out again sooner than they could prepare for. Yuuri thought of the flyers he saw for the city’s electric ballet. He managed to win a lottery once, sitting in his seat in a suit too short for his arms. The beauty of the story about a cursed maiden doomed by sorcerer lose everything including her Siegfried moved him to tears He knew before intermission that was his greatest wish, to spin and glide across rosin to wild applause.

Not only would he never dance, but he perhaps ruined his only chance at making a friend. The loss of the former was tolerable, as it was for a cause. The latter of the second due to his selfish prying… stung.

When he arrived at his usual spot, there was a lacquered box engraved with silver lying in the sand. Yuuri searched for its owner in an attempt to return it, as surely something so fine would be dearly missed. There were no humans within sight. Next to it lay a note on silver paper written in ebony ink stating only  _ for your temperance. _

Yuuri opened the clasp and almost dropped it, staring at hundreds of opals of brilliant fiery reds and glimmering blacks flecked with gold, lavender and blue, white with embers of orange and vermillion—

No one named Katsuki would need or want for anything ever again.

Yuuri closed the box before reopening it. This was some kind of mistake. He’d done nothing so noble that he deserved such treasure.

A white swan with eyes the color of the sea followed his movements..Something in its gaze made him stare until it looked away in seeming bashfulness. Its eyes were strangely… human, he believed.

A mystery for another day. Yuuri took the box to his parents, and his mother wept with relief. His father had the jewels appraised, and one solitary opal was enough to finance the inn for ten years on top of satisfying their existing creditors. Dancing was no longer unreachable, but Yuuri could not excise daydreams of argent hair from his mind. The city had a dance academy within one of the new golden and glass buildings. He received his education there instead of traveling by air to foreign lands, but his dream was coming true after all. Geography was inconsequential in the face of that.

Unless he was in class, Yuuri now had more free time. He could have made friends or practiced his forms more. Instead, he would stand by the sea with his dancing slippers on the sand behind him him, and wait as he did all the years before, for no place brought him greater peace than the spot where he met his man so long ago. 

The man never returned. As time moved onward, Yuuri’s face lost some of its youthful softness as he grew taller than his parents and sister and his voice deepened with maturity. His dance instructor, a kind yet stern old friend of his mother’s, trained elegance into his posture as well as gestures over the years, maturing him into a man whose every movement carried an economical grace.

At times he would dream of silver hair and bow-shaped lips, of soft skin like new feathers caressing his face and neck, causing him to wake needing to launder his bed clothes and linens with a deep, embarrassed flush across his cheeks.

Summer gave way to the Star Festival as it did every year, and the city sky exploded after dark with a display of fireworks in shimmering gold and crimson. Brilliant lasers added to the effect, as revelers celebrated with hot dango dripping with sauce and hand-held sparklers of their own.

It seemed fun, he supposed, but the sea called to him as it always had with his longing to see the elegant stranger once more. Yuuri chose to say an early goodnight, wandering to the shore in an elegant yukata of indigo and navy. It was startling to own such finery, but even he found himself lovely with his hair slicked back with the garment’s crimson and verdant beads reflecting light onto his skin. He followed the shoreline with his geta in hand, feeling strangely hollow. Altair came out as the sky grew darker, and he wondered if he would spend his life this way, waiting for something to begin that seemed to never follow through.

Wingbeats broke the silence, and when Yuuri turned to the sound, his soul began to lighten. His  _ mystery _ , that beautiful, long-haired man stood before him biting his own bottom lip.  “Were they enough?” he asked.

Yuuri smiled. “More than. We’ll never struggle again.”

His companion nodded, and strands of gossamer hair covered his eye. “I’m glad!”

Yuuri smiled, though it was sad. “I cannot repay you.”

“It is _I_ who repaid _you_ ,” he countered. “You are truly a rare person, as you could have stolen my skin to ease your hardship. You let me keep my freedom. Ending your burden is a small token in exchange.”

“I suppose,” Yuuri answered after a few minutes. He looked into the man’s eyes, and that time the beating echoing in his ears what that of his own rapid heart. Ethereal, that was the only word for such beauty, such immaculate comeliness, like he was a heavenly being, Orihime made flesh.

A soft noise escaped the man’s throat. “I do not understand.”

Shrugging as a breeze stirred his hair, Yuuri brushed his a stray strand out of his eyes. “As I said, I’d like to know you as yourself. I don’t expect gifts or compensation. That’s not what affection means.”

His cheeks, as pale as ever, became dotted with a tell-tale blush. He opened his mouth to reply, and instead closed it and looked heavenward. As he did so, Yuuri cast his eyes in the same direction. The sound of a wingbeat broke the moment, and when Yuuri looked to where he had stood, he had vanished.

In his place lay a single white feather adorned with quartz, diamond chips, and pearls.

Yuuri picked up the feather and gave it a close examination. It held a faint shimmer like a gem, the texture was that of brushed silk, and little droplets clung to the tip like frozen dew. Yuuri clutched it — tightly but  _ oh so carefully _ — as he traveled home.

His mother’s smile always outshone the rest, but thanks to their newfound security it came easier now. “Yuuri, what is that there?” she asked with a gesture to his hand.

“Would you?” he blurted, and with all the love she had, his mother plaited it into his hair as a fixture of his not-quite-friendship with… he never learned his name. Then again, Yuuri had not given his.

Yuuri’s young, foolish heart called out to him, and the next day at dusk, he walked to the same spot on the shore with a haphazard bouquet of sunflowers and zinnias. The soft beat of wings filled the air, growing louder as they came near, and the stranger appeared in white as always. He seemed friendlier than he had at the last meeting, as though Yuuri’s determination was causing the slow lowering of an insurmountable wall.

Before he spoke, he reached out to Yuuri’s hair, giving the now-permanent adornment a tug. Yuuri could not help but flush and stammer. “If this is akin to stealing your skin, I will gladly cut it out and return it.”

“I want you to have it,” the man told him while his elegant fingers lightly danced through Yuuri’s black strands.

Instead of embarrassment, Yuuri’s face heated for a different reason as he took a step closer compelled by his companion’s sweet touch.

His gaze dropped to Yuuri’s lips, and Yuuri pressed his head into his hand like a cat. “You are kind,” he said. “So many others in your world are cruel and selfish, thinking only of themselves and the satisfaction of their momentary desires.”

Yuuri considered all the men buying jewels from his family with an end goal of outdoing their friends. He thought of how their paramours were the same, not wanting anything beyond having something shinier and larger than anything belonging to a rival.

“A gift that is stolen is not a gift at all. Why take what someone is willing to give?” Yuuri asked.

The final defense, whatever it may have been, dropped. A smile, a  _ real smile _ bloomed on the man’s face, and Yuuri almost forgot himself as his own joy filled every corner of his soul.

Yuuri knew then — more than ever before in his entire short life — what love truly meant.

The moment was far too fleeting, and his beauty moved back. “Wait,” Yuuri began. “I wasn’t… I won’t  _ cage _ you —”

“It’s not that,” he was told. “It is not  _ you _ that frightens me. It’s…”

The story of Lilia and the ruddy-faced angry man rushed back to Yuuri’s mind. “I understand,” Yuuri answered. He had to swallow down his tears, but he did understand. As the citizens of the city would view Victor as some kind of rare curio locked within a gilded cage, so they gave Yuuri kind attention and friendly welcomes now that his family was well-off. Before their fortune changed, many looked at Yuuri as though he was little more than dirt. Such was the way of a world made with glitter and gold.

“As long as you wear my feather,” he was told. “Come to this spot and look to the sunset. You will call me, and as long as I am free, I will answer.”

“Can I know your name?” Yuuri asked, sensing he was due to depart.

He was granted a smile shaped like a heart. “Victor.”

“Yuuri,” Yuuri offered in turn.

Victor stroked the feather in Yuuri’s locks one final time before shimmering, leaving behind a few feathers as wingbeats pounded into the horizon. Yuuri collected them, and had his mother braid a second one next to the first. The others he hid in his bottom drawer with zinnias and sunflowers, pressing them secretly into the pages of a book.

Yuuri tried in vain to stay away so as to not abuse the trust he was granted or to possibly endanger Victor, but he was pulled to the shore by a stomach full of lovesickness. He ached in dance class, at the inn, every moment he did not see Victor. The pangs initially came once a month, then biweekly, then weekly, then every other day.

The sixth straight day after his willpower burned to ash, as Victor smiled upon his arrival, Yuuri covered his mouth with the realization of what he’d done.

The smile vanished off Victor’s lips. “Yuuri— “

“I shouldn’t come, should I?” Yuuri asked. “People who covet your pelt...they could see. I could ruin your life!”

“I’m not afraid,” Victor said.

“But why?” Yuuri asked. Victor had been skittish and standoffish for years to him. How could his heart change so suddenly?

“I’m not afraid because I know you would find me. If it took a thousand years, you would find me and set me free. As you did not cage me, I do not think you would allow someone else to. Please do not fear for me, Yuuri, for I don’t fear for myself any longer.”

It was Yuuri’s innate nature to be worried. However, for Victor he could be brave. “I’ll do my best.”

Victor’s face brightened thanks to his smile, and Yuuri quashed his nerves.

Time moved further onward, and Yuuri finished his training to join the corps in the electric ballet. He danced, dusted in shimmering gold powder and metal sequins, to rhythms etched on parchment ages before his birth. But he refused to removed the feathers woven into his now shoulder-length hair.

A girl in the corps with him called Yuu-chan, who was sprightly with auburn hair and warm eyes, asked him about the adornments during one rehearsal. “Are those from someone who loves you?” she asked.

Yuuri’s thoughts ran to Victor: his smiles, their talks and comfortable silences, how light his heart became upon every one of Victor’s arrivals. “They’re from someone _I_ love,” was his reply.

Regardless of how Victor felt, Yuuri loved him. It was enough to have him in his orbit. It was  _ s _ _ o much more _ than enough to have him come to Yuuri with smiles instead of words that cut.

Demanding he love Yuuri in return was no love at all.

After every performance, Yuuri scanned the crowd for starlight hair and eyes the color of newborn stars. There was always a moment of disappointment, until he recalled the danger should Victor show. He would go to the shoreline instead of out to drink with his comrades. He would talk with his Victor of dance, and the stars,  and everything in between, and he realized truly he would never want for anything so long as Victor stayed close to him.

He would wonder sometimes at the smiles given now so freely, at the warmth in Victor’s gaze... could Victor possibly love him equally in turn? He never asked. He wanted Victor as he was, not as Yuuri wished him to be.

Another Star Festival came, Yuuri again bypassing it for the shore. His regalia this year was a shimmery royal blue with silver and black, and he waited until dusk for Victor to arrive.

Arrive he did, though this time his glamour was sheer white and pink, dotted with golden stars. He was the most beautiful sight in the world, and Yuuri fell deeper in love.

Though he could not help this time but ask. “Do you… not have other places to be?”

Victor smiled at him. “I’m at the only place I wish to rest.”

“Aren’t you lonely, though? Or neglecting a…” This was difficult. “A mate?”

“Swans mate for life,” Victor answered, looking into Yuuri’s eyes. “Even the immortal ones.”

It was odd how a foregone conclusion could still hurt so much, Yuuri thought with a sad smile. Still, they sat close to watch the rockets shoot for the stars, and Victor wrapped an arm around Yuuri’s shoulders. Yuuri’s heart quickened, then dropped. It was a struggle to be so happy and yet in so much pain.

The season at the electric ballet continued, but an understudy named Minami was bumped to the corps. “Asahi is ill,” their choreographer explained.

A week later bore another understudy moving into the corps to replace someone else. Then the principals, the prima…on and on it went until Yuuri was one of very few who did not fall sick. A pandemic of a violent influenza tore through the city, and thanks to living far from its center at the inn, Yuuri was one of only a few spared.  

Doctors worked quickly, but the fatalities grew in number, and the ballet had to close indefinitely. Suddenly the fine citizens did not gleam so bright — they seldom left home due to fear of the disease, or their recovery turned them thin and wan, the expensive gowns and tailored suits hanging off their now-gaunt figures.

The city was full of funerals, the news sparse between reports of the pandemic as well as obituaries for new casualties. Yuuri lost friends from the ballet, including Yuu-chan, and the shroud of grief over the city exhausted his body as well as his heart. As he worked at the inn once more, he found the weariness made his tasks more difficult than they should have been.

Yuuri decided it was likely he needed to adjust to the work again, nothing more or less. Until one day, he collapsed washing the linens. A doctor came to the inn, and he had contracted the same lethal fever. Had Yuuri sought treatment immediately, the prognosis would not have been so final. As such he was low on time, for the Moirai cruelly sheared his string far too short upon his birth.

His family paid for the finest care for comfort in his final days, but the sand dripping through an hourglass is an unstoppable inevitability. At sunset after several weeks of bed rest, Yuuri knew his time was gone. He put on the blue and silver yukata, and with all the stealth he could muster, he walked to his spot on the shore.

Wingbeats came within moments. “You came!” Victor cried with relief and joy. “I began to think you… that you no longer… Well. No matter. You’re here now and…” The bright happiness bursting from within gave way to something dimmer, something shadowy like sorrow. “You are unwell.”

Yuuri’s answering smile was brittle. “I am at my life’s end, and my last wish was to be close to you one final time. I’ve never asked for anything from you, but… please, stay by my side and don’t leave.”

There were too many emotions to name within Victor’s eyes as he held Yuuri’s gaze. “You only ever had to ask.”

“Demanding you stay wouldn’t be right. I would be no better than someone stealing your pelt.” He had longed to so often, so many times he let the words hang on his lips unspoken.

“You cannot take what I give freely,” Victor responded. “My fidelity has been yours all this time, as well as my heart.”

How unjust, that he only learned this in his final moments!

Yuuri reached out to Victor, and he was pulled into his arms, his silver hair falling against his cheek. Yuuri looked into his eyes and allowed himself a long dreamt of gesture to end their time together.

He kissed Victor’s lips, soft and inviting as they were, and Victor sighed. Yuuri wanted to say something like  _ at last _ . Instead, he wept from the knowledge they waited too long. He was too weak, and when he opened his eyes Victor’s face blurred before him.

Victor seemed to sense it, as he cradled Yuuri within his arms, walking slowly into the unnaturally still sea. The water was so smooth it reflected the stars and space above like a polished mirror, and when the water was up to Victor’s chest with Yuuri’s face just above it, Victor kissed him anew.

At that moment, a wave crashed over them, and Yuuri coughed and choked. Victor’s kiss grew in ardor, and instead of his embrace, Yuuri felt death pull him under.

Though… something changed, the strength returning to Yuuri as he opened his eyes. They floated as one, and with Yuuri’s renewal, he deepened the kiss further. Victor’s white and rose garments clung to him, completely sheer now, and another wave crashed over them as Yuuri mapped his skin like he’d longed to for so long he could no longer count the years.

Their hearts kept time with one another’s, and Victor pushed the beaded indigo fabric off Yuuri’s body as well. Yuuri felt like a shadow, fading away in the darkness to become invisible.

Suddenly, he was free.

He longed to see Victor clearly, but feeling him mattered more, and so Yuuri wrapped his legs around his waist to pull them flush together. His nerves lit aflame, his mouth letting loose a moan as Victor’s obvious and equal arousal slid against his own. Yuuri gripped Victor’s broad back, digging his nails in, and as the waves crashed and the world fell down, they made love to one another in a sea of stars.

Riding the crest of not only the tide but his pleasure, Yuuri wept for a different reason. This would be his only chance. To finally be loved in return and for it to always last, he prayed to whoever was listening to get a second chance.

Victor’s breaths began to shudder in their kiss, and Yuuri pulled him closer. His thighs trembled as the familiar sound of wings beating through the air grew close, intensifying, as Yuuri’s vision became nothing but a white light, as sparks shimmered through his soul, as the very heavens above became nothing more than Victor, as their pleasure peaked in tandem —

Yuuri believed he was flying.

No — Yuuri  _ was _ flying. He began to thrash and panic, flailing large wings of ebony feathers tipped with a bright scarlet. Next to him soared a great swan of white and silver with luminescent blue eyes…  _ Victor _ .

Victor took him under his wing, quite literally, and guided them the scant few feet to solid ground. White feathers whirled to present Victor’s human guise. “Now you,” he urged.

Yuuri closed his eyes and when he reopened them, he once again had hands and skin. The ebony feathers drifted around him, and he reached with fear to where the white ones had been plaited. They remained in place, and Yuuri breathed a sigh of relief. His fever was gone, and his body felt more powerful than ever before.

“I don’t understand,” Yuuri said.

Victor held two of the ebony and red feathers. He twisted them into a braid behind his right ear to match the white ones in Yuuri’s hair. When he finished, he spoke a familiar phrase that filled Yuuri’s heart with joy. “Swans mate for life. Even the immortal ones.”

Yuuri looked towards the city, the glimmering gates and clean, sharp glass. The parks with their statues of Amaterasu and Prometheus, the dome of cut pink crystals above the stage of the electric ballet, and yet Yuuri only felt truly at home here by the shoreline with clear stars above and Victor by his side. He took Victor’s hand, and wings beat through the air, leaving no sign of either of them after.

For many years after, even to this day, if a person from Hasetsu felt alone or unloved, something would call them to the same spot on the shore. They would be greeted by a mated pair of swans: one deep black with two white feathers in his right wing, the other white like snow with a pair of black feathers to match his mate.

If the witness was pure of heart, then their fondest wishes would be granted. Should a pair of men in white and black dotted with jewels like stars have been the ones making their dreams come true… no one found it that remarkable.

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by Lily, Robbie, and Nuri. Thank you all so much. All of them gave me some variation of "don't fuck the swan, Yuuri" as a comment but what Yuuri wants Yuuri gets. I'm not sorry. There was also a lot of "ho don't" re: the cloak. I love my betas a lot. <3
> 
> This was originally my MerMay last spring! Then Litmag asked me to Pinch Hit for the "Space" issue, and I finished it. 
> 
> I'm not really kidding about Can You Feel the Love Tonight btw. It will enhance your reading. A lot.
> 
> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/sink_or_swim) / [Tumblr](https://sinkingorswimming.tumblr.com)


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